Patronal Festival and Farewell service

 Patronal Festival and final service – July 7 2024

“I thank my God every time I remember you”, writes one of our two patron saints, St Paul to the church in Phillipi. When I pondered which Bible readings to choose for my final service at Seal, there was never any doubt that this would be one of them. 

I don’t know whether I intended to stay as long as I have done here in Seal, but eighteen years later, I’m still here. Now and then, a Bishop or Archdeacon has asked me whether I might feel like moving but my answer has always been “No, why would I, when Seal is the best parish in the universe?” 

That’s not to say it’s all been easy, of course. No community can exist without disagreements - not if it is a real community, where people are allowed to be real people, in all their baffling diversity. But if we stick with one another through the ups and downs, we learn to see God in each other, and once you have seen that, happily, it is something that you can never quite unsee, even if you wanted to. 

I have often described ministry as a “Great God Hunt”, not in the sense that God is hiding from us, making himself hard to find, but that we are invited each day to open our eyes to his presence around us, to wonder where we will stumble across him that day. Usually, if I spot that “good work” of God in people’s lives as Paul puts it, it’s in the things I haven’t planned or worked at. Instead, it will be in the comment of a child in school collective worship, or a story, an idea, a joy or a sorrow someone tentatively shares with me, a moment of connection, a sense that something is happening which really matters. There have been countless moments like this, countless times when I have seen the “good work” of God in you. “I thank my God every time I remember you”, 

But this passage isn’t just about looking back to the past. It is also very much about the future. Paul prays for this little congregation in Phillipi, “that their love may overflow more and more.”  He doesn’t pray that nothing bad will ever happen to them – after all, he’s in prison when he writes these words. Nor does he pray that they will be successful in worldly terms, with thousands flocking to join them. No, he prays that their love “may overflow more and more” so that there will one day be a “harvest of righteousness” because of them, things that have been put right in the world, ways in which their love has made a difference. 

Before I was ordained, my good friend Carol, who was a Reader in the church she and I attended, told me about a conversation she had had with another Reader, called Dot. Dot wasn’t a great academic theologian or a particularly eloquent preacher and yet, somehow, people who came into her orbit seemed to be wonderfully changed by the experience. One day Carol asked her what her secret was. Dot paused and thought, as Carol waited for some erudite pearl of wisdom, till Dot said “you’ve just got to love them…” Many of you will have heard me tell that story before, and I don’t apologise for that, because it is one that I’ve carried with me through the years, and returned to again and again, especially if I was feeling tempted by the latest fad or fashion swilling around in the church, looking for some magic wand to wave over the difficulties of church life – not enough people, not enough money, arguments and frustrations.  “You’ve just got to love them…”, said Dot, and she was right, though I think I’d want to add that you’ve got to let them love you too, and we have both felt mightily loved here.

In church life, some ideas succeed, while some sink without trace. The numbers in church go up and down for reasons that aren’t always obvious. Clergy have to record those numbers in a register after every service, but I’ve learned to be sceptical about those statistics, because as ever with statistics, we only count the things we can count, and we then try to convince ourselves that they are the things which actually count. The problem is that there’s no column in the service register for the most important question of all, which is “did people go away at the end knowing they were loved?”, reminded, or perhaps discovering for the first time, that, just as they are, they are precious to God. That’s what really counts, if only we could count it, because if they did, they will have found a love which can’t but overflow to others, and change the world for the better.

So we look back with gratitude, and we look forward with hope.

But what about the present? What can we say about this moment, now? 

A few weeks ago, as I was decluttering in advance of our move, I came across three ring binders, which turned out to contain the scripts of all the sermons I’d preached in the early years of my ministry, before I had a computer to store them on, including my very first sermon after my ordination as a Deacon in 1993. I was evidently preaching from Romans Chapter 12, “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” and  I told the congregation about the point in the ordination  service where those of us being ordained had literally “presented our bodies”. One by one, as our names were read out, each of us took a big step forward towards the Bishop– we were told to make it obvious, a sign of that step forward into a new ministry and a new life.  Retirement may sound like a step backwards, but in reality, like every other part of our journey of life, we have to go forwards to embrace it, and that’s what I hope to do, as deliberately as I did at my ordination, continuing that “great God hunt”, looking for God at work in this new stage of life.  

But this moment is also a step forward for you.  The period between one vicar and the next can be a tricky and unsettling one to navigate. It is tempting to retreat, to hunker down and just wait, but I hope you won’t do that. I hope instead that you will hear the invitation in this time to step forward, to discover new gifts, grow closer together, support and encourage each other. 

And if that sometimes feels a bit scary, as it probably will, for you and for us too,  perhaps we can take comfort from today’s Gospel story, which features our other Patron Saint, Peter. He steps forward, right out of the boat he is sailing in on this stormy sea, and after a few steps, unsurprisingly, he starts to sink. He realises he is way out of his depth, and that people, in any case, can’t walk on water. But in that moment, he cries out “Lord save me”, and the Lord does save him. Jesus didn’t ever rebuke him for getting out of the boat and trying. In fact, it’s Jesus who calls him to do so, not because walking on water is a great party trick if you can manage it, but so that Peter can discover that whenever life overwhelms him, Jesus will be right there.   

I thank my God every time I remember you… and I pray that your love may continue to overflow, as it has done to us over these last 18 years. And I pray that we will all  have the courage to step forward, out of the boat, even if it means sinking a bit from time to time, so that we can learn to stretch out our hands and find that we are held securely by the one who will never let us go. 

Amen